1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 144. Bee Gees – Odessa (1969)
Thanks to their close association with the films Saturday Night Fever and Grease, I tend to think of the Bee Gees as a Seventies group, much parodied in my youth as the archetype of the “disco medallion man”. But this, in 1969, is their sixth album already, and it’s pretty far from disco (closer perhaps to Massachusetts and other swirling ballads in style).
It was originally meant as a concept album
based around the story of the first track Odessa, the disappearance of a
fictional ship meant to evoke the Marie Celeste or the HMS Erebus. But although
aurally the songs hang together, thematically they are about things as
disparate as the invention of electric light (Edison) or Marley Purt Drive about a man
overwhelmed with children. Most of the album is somewhat folk/country rock
ballads with orchestral backing, one track (Give Your Best) is more like a Gram
Parsons country track. The final quarter of the album (it’s a double/triple
album) features orchestral tracks; Seven Seas Symphony is led by a Rachmaninov
style piano backed by lush strings, With All Nations is a stirring
“international anthem”.
At the end of the album, the single First
of May starts off sounding quite Christmassy, and then the lyrics mention “When
we were small and Christmas trees were tall”, so I guess it was intended that
way. The final track, The British Opera, retains the melody of First of May and
builds on it to a crescendo of strings, like it was the soundtrack to a
heart-warming redemptive Christmas film (I want to say starring David Niven and
Anne Bancroft, for some reason).
Yeah. Different, and probably not one I
would have gone to because I think that early mockery of the Bee Gees has made
me prejudiced against them as serious musicians. I hereby apologise to the
Brothers Gibb for misjudging, and prejudging, them, because I enjoyed this one.
I even added the track I Laugh In Your Face to my 1001 Albums Favourites
playlist, because I think it’s all we can do with some of the leaders and
politicians we have these days who use divisive rhetoric to gain power. We are,
as the song says, just one race.
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